Haiku Alpha 2

Now, this is not new as Haiku Alpha 2 came out in early May of this year.
However, as I've mentioned, I was away from home for three months essentially without a usable internet which means I'm a little behind the times.
Anyway, I finally got around to installing Haiku Alpha 2.
Strangely, I just couldn't get it to install from a CD of either the iso or the anyboot image (actually, I just can't remember precisely why it wouldn't install or if I got any error messages as this happened a few days ago).
Nevertheless, when I created a Live USB from the anyboot image, it worked perfectly and installed without problems on a Dell Dimension 9200, a Dell Dimension E520 and my trusty old Acer EeePC 901.
The install is easy and quite painless and completes in well less than 10 minutes.
Getting Haiku to boot from Grub2 is very easy and I've already outlined how this is done here.
So, how does Haiku Alpha 2 look?
To be honest, not a whole lot different from Haiku Alpha 1 and this list of the major differences between Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 supports this view.
However, from my point of view, Haiku has now suddenly become usable on a day-to-day basis because of the introduction of the WebPositive browser.
Look, at least 95% of what I do on any of my computers involves a web browser (generally Chromium on Linux or Mac, Chrome Canary on Windows 7 because I want speed and an easy-to-use bookmarking or speeddial system).
Well, there's no Google Chrome for Haiku but WebPositive is not at all bad. It is FAST -- even impressively so. Unfortunately, there's no speeddial, but there is a reasonable bookmarking system.
Unfortunately too, Haiku still has no flash so this rules out a lot of stuff other than YouTube videos. For example, I can't run an internet speed test in Haiku and the analog clock that I include in my iGoogle home page shows constantly 6:31 (so it's right just twice per day).
I had hoped that Haiku Alpha 2 would give me wifi on the EeePC 901 (RaLink RT2860 wireless card) but my card wasn't picked up either by the official Alpha 2 or the nightly build ( haiku-nightly-r38693-x86gcc2hybrid-anyboot.zip) I downloaded from this haiku-files.org.
My general view of this Alpha 2 is dominated by the positive impression I got from WebPositive and I look forward to learniong more about Haiku as this browser encourages me to use it more.
Note, that as yet I have not done a complete survey of what does and does not work on any of the computers on which I've installed Haiku. But, in the meantime, here are some specific observations and experiences I've had to date:

1. The nightly build that I installed (as mentioned above) did not include WebPositive. However, it's very easy to install using the InstallOptionalPackage command as detailed here.
2. My Dell Dimension E520 uses a very old CRT screen for which the nVidia Geforce 7300 LE card offers a maximum screen resolution of 1024x768. This is not optimal and I always use 1280x1050 on the Ubuntu and Windows 7 OSes I have installed on the same machine. These become available when I download and install the accelerated graphics driver for my card.
However, no accelerated graphics drivers are available from nVidia.
Nevertheless, the haikuware site has a lot of drivers available, so don't give up till you've checked here.
I installed the Unified nVidia Driver and, purely by chance, this provided the 1280x1050 resolution I wanted.
3. A very small but far from insignificant observation is the command listdev which is equivalent to lspci in Linux. Very useful when you can't quite remember what cards you have and where.
4. When I used earlier versions of Haiku (pre-alpha) on my EeePC 901, I was always able to mount ALL other OSes on the same machine. Of course, in those days, all of my other OSes were Linux distros.
Now, on my Dell Dimention 9200 where I have, in addition to Haiku Alpha 2 Windows 7, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 10.10 Beta.
In Haiku only Windows 7 and Vista are available for mounting. The other three are apparently not mountable.
I have a similar experience on my Dell Dimension E520, where, in addition to Haiku Aplha 2 I have Windows 7, Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.10 beta. Once again, Haiku only sees the Windows OSes as avail;able for mounting and ignores Ubuntu.
On the EeePC 901 right now I have only Ubuntu 10.10 and two versions of Haiku. Here all OSes are mounteble in Haiku. So, Ubuntu, which can't be mounted on either of my desktops, mounts without problem on the netbook.
I can't find any other references to this mounting problem so I'll probably post to the Haiku forum to see if there's an explanation.
5. In either OS X or Ubuntu, I make extensive use of a dock (AWN in Ubuntu) and don't consider an OS complete without one. I've even installed the Winstep Nexus dock in Wiundows 7.
In Haiku, there's LaunchBox which serves the purpose pretty well.
So much so that I want it to be there from the boot up.
For this, you must edit (using StyledEdit) the file /boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript which means just opening a terminal and using the following command:

StyledEdit /boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript

Then at the bottom of this file just add the line

/boot/home/config/be/"Desktop applets"/LaunchBox

save the file and reboot and you should see LaunchBox on your desktop.
6. Now, from my perspective, LaunchBox wouldn't be complete without an icon for the excellent WebPositive.
To get this, I created a Desktop icon for the browser with the follwoing command:

ln -s /boot/apps/WebPositive/WebPositive /boot/home/Desktop/

This provides an icon on the Desktop. Next, right-click anywhere on LaunchBox (other than the orange banner) and select "Add button here".
Now, you just need to drag the desktop icon to the space you just created in LaunchBox.
7. I also like to be able to quickly reboot or shutdown my computer so I tried to create desktop icons (intending to place them in the LaunchBox) for both commands.
Now, up to now, I haven't been able to find a "reboot" command but there is one for "shutdown" at /boot/system/bin/shutdown.
So, I use this command to create a desktop icon:

ln -s /boot/system/bin/shutdown /boot/home/Desktop/

However, when I click on the resulting icon, I get a message saying
"The application "shutdown" might be blocked on a modal panel"
after which it offers me the options of Killing the Application or Cancelling the Shutdown.
If I choose Kill Application, the shutdown goes ahead as normal.
Strangley, if I run the command
/boot/system/bin/shutdown
in a terminal, the shutdown proceeds without interuption.
Don't understand this so, once again, I may post to the forum on this.
8. This problem only applies to the EeePC 901 install. The only screen resolution available is 1024x768 which is just a little deeper than the EeePC's native resolution of 1024x600. As a result, I find in some cases that the bottom part of drop-down lists is off the bottom of the screen. Not sure how, or even if, this can be resolved.
9. I'm actually preparing this blogpost in WebPositive on the Dimension E520 and, although it's in general working fine, I did find some annoying absences in this browser as follows:
i) I can't Add Links to words or phrases
ii) Although right-clicking on a document in WebPositive provides an extensive spell-checking menu, none of the options work for me.

OK, so that's how it looks at the moment.
I certainly intend to use, and learn from, Haiku more extensively in the immediate future. I just hope that Haiku matures into something as exciting as is widely foreseen within my lifetime. No, I'm not planning on dying soon, but this development is not going at breakneck speed.

WPA wireless in Haiku

I've been following the development of the Haiku OS for nearly four years now and still remain enthralled by it's lightening fast boot and its many other distinctive features.
Now, I've got Haiku working on my EeePC901 netbook with WPA2 wireless encryption and this is really another remarkable milestone in the evolution of this OS.
A week or so ago, the availability of wpa_supplicant on Haiku was announced here.
Unfortunately, I just couldn't get any of the nightlies from r42775 to r42804 to actually boot for me on the netbook as all of my attempts just ended up booting to a black screen from a usb-key.
Luckily I posted to the Haiku forum and found that others, too, had the same problem. Not only that but a solution was posted which worked well for me.
Nevertheless, while the solution suggests using a fail-safe video mode to boot the recalcitrant nightly from usb-key to a workable Desktop, none of available fail-safe video modes, even when additionally using full fail-safe mode, brought me to anything other than an unusable black screen.
Therefore, I booted to Haiku R1A3 on my E520 Desktop and mounted the live usb-key containing r42804 in read-write mode.
Then I copied /boot/system/add-ons/accelerants/intel_extreme.accelerant from R1A3 on the Desktop HD to /system/add-ons/accelerants/ on the usb-key thereby replacing the intel-extreme.accelerant in the r42804 nightly.
[Note that in the account given in the forum thread, I also replaced from haiku R1A3 the intel-extreme drivers in both /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/bin/ and /system/add-ons/kernel/drivers/dev/graphics. However, this appears to be unnecessary as replacing only intel_extreme.accelerant is sufficient to get the usb-key to boot perfectly]
Now, the usb-key with the nightly booted perfectly on my netbook so that I was easily able to install the upgraded version of Haiku over Haiku R1A3 without prior partition initialization.
To fully restore everything I initially had on the R1A3, I just needed to install the optionalpackage webpositive which unexplainedly did not survive the upgrade.
Additionally, I had to add this line

/boot/home/config/be/"Desktop applets"/LaunchBox &

to /boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript and then restore /boot/Synthetic/Synthetic and /boot/apps/freeSpace/freeSpace to the LaunchBox.
Now, with everything back to the way it was before upgrading the System, I was able to install the optionalpackage wpa_supplicant.
Then, after a reboot, I unplugged my ethernet cable and issue this command

ifconfig /dev/net/ralink2860/0 list

and found the two wifi networks in our house.
Then to get a connection, I issued this command

ifconfig /dev/net/ralink2860/0 join wifi_interface_name wifi_interface_password

and within seconds, I was connected to my local wpa2 encrypted wifi network.
One problem, however, is that Haiku, at present, does not remember previous wifi networks and the join command must be issued after every reboot.
However, this difficulty can be easily overcome by reating a small script as shown below:

#! /bin/bash
sleep 1
ifconfig /dev/net/ralink2860/0 join wifi_interface_name wifi_interface_password

which I called wifi_start and then adding the line

/boot/home/wifi_start &

to /boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript which will then connect to the wifi at boot.

3D games on Haiku

I was very excited when I saw this post to the Haiku Forum a few weeks ago.
Not that I'm a gamer as I've never played anything in my many years fooling around in many different OSes on a lot of different computers.
However, I am very interested in the way Haiku is blossoming into an amazingly fast, simple to use, and fun desktop OS and just wanted to see how good 3D games looked in it.
So, I browsed to the 3D Games section of Haikuware and tried out a number of games including Chromium BSU, Cube, Cylindrix Haiku, Doom, FooBillard and QuakeIII for Haiku.
Of these, the only one that even appeared like it might work was FooBillard in which I saw the billiard table and could get it to move and rotate. Also I could get the ball to move but the movement was horribly slow and disjointed like the fps were very, very low.
At this point I was getting disappointed.
However, not to be outdone, I installed PrBoom from Synthetic Package Manager and, guess what, this works perfectly, or almost, in Haiku gcc2hybrid r39983 on my Dell E520 with nVidia GeForce 7300 LS and Intel 82801H/ICH8 HD Audio controller.
SPM installed PrBoom to /boot/apps but to get sound in the game I had to download the timidity patches zipfile from here and unzip it to /boot/apps/prboom/. Then I opened /boot/apps/timidity.cfg in StyledEdit and commented out the line

dir /boot/home/config/share/timidity

and replaced it with

dir /boot/apps/prboom

Now sound works perfectly.
Still not a gamer but this game looks very good for an OS that's still in Alpha. Alright, it's not WoW but it's so much better than games in DosBox.
One minor disappointment is that the game does not fill my 1920x1080 screen but seems to be something like 1460x1050 which is still highly acceptable.
Also, when I quit the game, the background image on my Desktop has shrunk in size. However, just mousing around brings the original wallpaper back.
I should mention, too, that I use my wireless mouse in the PrBoom game and this works very well.

Got my Mac back -- but many problems in setup.

Last Saturday, the internal HDD on my MacBook died -- this is the third one I've lost in just 16 months of the life of this computer.
Luckily I had paid €319 for an AppleCare Protection Plan as soon as the warranty on my Mac ran out last August. So, now I'm covered up to August of 2010.
So, today I got the Mac back with a new HDD but I still had an awful lot of work to do to get back my multiboot system.
First problem -- OS X Leopard disk damaged
Before re-installing Leopard, I checked the disk's integrity. It failed after about 48%.
So I cleaned it with window cleaner, although one very small but obvious defect remained, and tried again. This time it failed after about 62%.
Next I tried to clean it with toothpaste, rubbing it with my fingers. I gave it what could be called a through clean, but the defect I mentioned was still visible although very very small.
Tried the disk check again and it failed again.
Now, I tried the metal polish Silvo. Here I used a soft cloth with a radial motion (occasionally doing it in a circular motion). did this for about 5-7 minutes, washed with warm water, dried it and examined it. The defect was still there but barely visible.
However, I fully expected it to fail again but it didn't. And the install went fine after this.
I was very glad about this as I probably would have had to have bought a new Leopard disk at a cost of €110.

Next problem -- creating partitions on Mac HDD

Although I had done this many times before, and never had a problem that I can remember, this time I had to overcome quite a number of difficulties to get this done although I did succeed in the end.
I tried first with the GParted 3.0 disk but the Mac just spat that out 20-30 seconds after booting it (this is WITHOUT anything at all having appeared on the screen -- NO, it wasn't after the program had been transferred to RAM).
So, then I tried the 1.8 disk. This time it booted but the mouse movement was extremely jerky and difficult to get it to do anything. Worse, however, was the fact that although I could get the mouse cursor to the partition image, and the pointer changed shape as expected, I just could not drag the partition to a smaller size.
Well, with only one other version available to me, I then tried the 2.1 disk and this WORKED -- although the mouse was still very unsmooth in its movements.
Nevertheless, I got all of my new partitions created and formatted including two new small partitions aimed at installing Haiku and Senryu.

Ibex or Hardy on the Mac?

My experiences with Ibex so far have not been totally good. In particular, I'm annoyed that one of my favourite apps (Yakuake) doesn't work correctly in Ibex (on my Mac anyway) in that the F12 key doesn't open/close it.
In any event, I tried it again (28-11-2008 one month after launch) on the Mac. Install went fine and I installed all the updates without problem.
However, Ibex looked very buggy with these problems:

1. Same thing with Yakuake. I'm surprised that I haven't seen anything else in Google on this problem as I've had it on the alpha, the beta and several installs of the final product -- although all on the same machine. I've even emailed the developer about it and he didn't seem to have heard of it before. Maybe it's just a Mac thing. However, I've used various versions of Ubuntu here without ever seeing this problem before.
2. Very slow to shutdown if it shutdown at all. Kept stopping at particular points in the shutdown sequence so that, invariably, I had to hold down the power button to get it to halt.
3. Not totally sure if this was a Ibex problem or something with my router but the wireless signal strength detected by Ibex varied from almost zero to close to 100% (100% being expected as the computer was right beside the wireless router). This was such that almost always no connection could be made. Killian had no problem with the strength of his wireless upstairs and the EeePC also showed no problem.

So, guess what, I switched to Hardy and this is currently operating without any problems.

msftres -- where did this come from?

As usual, after installing Ubuntu Ibex on the Mac, when I rebooted I just got a white screen -- nothing else.
So, again as usual, I used Gparted to look at the partitions and found, again, that all the partitions were greyed out and each had a yellow warning sign against it.
However, just fiddling around with the Manage Flags option (even though I didn't actually change anything) got rid of the warning signs and the partitions all became "ungreyed".
I really have no idea what this is, but luckily it's easy to get rid of.
However, something strange is that both FAT32 partitions (sda3 and sda 12) that I had created for Senryu and Haiku) had msftres flags.
Apparently these are Microsoft Reserved partitions and it's some kind of Gparted bug.
There are some articles, tips about this because apparently having this flag, which is difficult to get rid of, can stop the partition from being mounted in OSX.
The first time I tried, I couldn't remove the msftres flag in GParted but the second time I could by substituting it with a Boot flag. However, taking away the boot flag, just brought back the msftres flag.
Nevertheless, I tried to mount one of the partitions labelled with this in Ubuntu and had no problem so I'm not sure if I should worry.
Also, it seems that these two msftres flags were the reason for two grey Legacy OS (and later Haiku OS) icons in the rEFIt menu.

Haiku nightly has wifi again

I posted a few months ago that Haiku nightlies now supported wifi with WPA encryption on my EeePC 901 (ralink2860 card).
However, it seems that in more recent nightlies, wpa_supplicant was broken as it certainly didn~t work on my machine.
I posted to Haiku Forums on this but really got no very useful replies.
However, somebody else had raised the broken wpa_supplicant issue in the bug tracker to which I subsequently added some detail.
But, today I updated the version of Haiku (hrev44007) on my EeePC 901 and now wifi works perfectly.
Of course, still need to add the encryption password after the boot. But, as I mentioned before, this can be included in a bootscript so that wifi connects automatically on every boot.
I should mention that when I updated without initializing the partition, although it did update without error, not even an ethernet connection was available.
Without ethernet, its impossible to install wpa_supplicant.
Both wired and wireless connection were, however, possible from the usb-key which I used to install the OS.

Karmic upgrade really messed up my EeePC 901

For the last 15 months I've been running a nice multiboot system (up to 5 Linux OSes and Haiku) on my EeePC 901. Then a few weeks ago, I upgraded Ubuntu Jaunty to Karmic Beta. Everything seemed to go fine and I lost nothing although I was somewhat disappointed that the expected boost in boot speed never happened for me.
Then a couple of days ago, I was trying to install Pardus (in place where I had Arch Linux which, regrettably, I never really used) when I noticed I had completely run out of space on the Ubuntu root partition. So, with 30MB in /var/log I decided to delete this folder. After all, it's just logs that I'm never going to read, right? Well, not quite.
The next time I tried to boot to Ubuntu, I got a message saying there was some install error and I needed to contact my administrator. However, as I'm the administrator, that didn't help.
Nothing for it then but to re-install Karmic but leaving /home unformatted.
The install went as expected but when I booted the machine, I was surprised by the huge delay with just "GRUB loading" on the screen for at least one full minute.
The boot menu itself when it finally showed up also reacted uncharacteristically slowly.
The problem seems to be that Grub's been updated from 0.97 to 1.97. Well, what the hell for? I can see no benefits whatsoever and quite a few setbacks. There's an expression that might be usefully pondered here "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
But that wasn't the worst. Grub2 now longer uses the tried and trusted /boot/grub/menu.lst that I have found invaluable for multibooting. Now there's /boot/grub/grub.cfg which has a very different and seemingly much more complex format.
But for what? The boot menu that appears on boot looks exactly like what would be produced by menu.lst so what benefits arise from this change?
The "Do no edit this file" on /boot/grub/grub.cfg didn't lead me to believe that fiddling around with this was encouraged but that's exactly what I need to do as I explore different OSes.
Perhaps some day I'll regret having posted this gloomy report if I ever discover what good can arise from this change. But for the moment, I want to steer clear of it.
Now, something else happened after this "clean" install of Karmic that may or may not be related to the install.
Although wireless worked perfectly when I upgraded from Jaunty, and also initially worked fine in the cleanly installed Karmic, after about one day of operation, I suddenly had no wifi. No, it wasn't the router and surprisingly, when I booted to OpenSUSE, it too had no wireless. Also running "lspci" showed no wireless card.
So, looked like my RaLink 2860 had bitten the dust. Oh boy.
Anyway, I decided to go back to Jaunty as Grub2 was really annoying me. I did this again as a clean install (Unetbootin and separately downloaded Ubuntu-9.04-i386Desktop.iso) but without formatting /home.
This worked fine and Grub1 really was streets ahead of Grub2 and the old boot speed happily returned. But amazingly, so did my wifi without me having done anything special. Now "lspci" shows the RaLink 2860 and iwconfig shows ra0 interface and wifi works without problem.
It's unclear to me now whether the problem was that the wireless card is on the blink and has now just temporarily been given a stay of execution or whether the rt2860sta driver in Karmic is deficient. Unfortunately, the fact that I had no wifi in OpenSUSE either suggests that the former conclusion is more likely to be correct. But let's see.

Linux Mint 7 (Gloria) on EeePC 901

I'd used earlier versions of Mint quite some time ago and thought I'd try it again, but this time on my EeePC 901.
Really, though, I had too much stuff on this little machine, the majority of which I never used. So, I had Xandros, Ubuntu, Senryu, Haiku, DSL, Puppy, TinyCoreLinux and Moblin. That's eight OS's all squished into the <20MB of HDD space.
Now I decided that it was time for a change. So, my current arrangement is to have just four OSes: Ubuntu, Xandros, Haiku and Linux Mint.
Actually, I'm not sure if I'll stay with Xandros as it too is never used. I really don't like these simplified, Windows-like versions of Linux such as Moblin and UNR.
In any event, Linux Mint was very simple to install (3.4 GB /, 2.5 GB /home) using Unetbootin. Indeed, the install and subsequent operation, once again, showed me how similar Mint is to Ubuntu (on which it is based).
Indeed, up to now, I really haven't seen anything much to convince me that I'm not using Ubuntu, it is just so similar. Perhaps the only difference is the colour scheme and sounds.
Wireless worked OOTB and no problems of any kind were met in getting it set up.
I installed Kiba-Dock without problems. The only strange thing here was that dragging icons/apps from the Mint menu didn't produce icons in the dock. Instead, it was necessary to drag the icon/app to the main panel and then drag from there to the Kiba dock. Weird.
Other than that, just about everything works without me needing to do anything including sound, video, webcam.
And if you know Ubuntu, you can assume that Linux Mint won't surprise you in anything.

More efforts to get VMware Server working well in Linux on MacBook

OK, so VMware Server in Sidux on the MacBook just wasn't great based on my initial experience with Haiku.
Then I tried Kurumin (new 8.04 Beta) VM in Sidux and had quite a few problems. In particular, when in Firefox (never got as far as installing Opera), there was a distinct tendency for the mouse pointer to become either very slow/unresponsive or actually disappear altogether.
Because of these problems, I decided I'd have a look at how VMware Server stacks up in Hardy and Foresight.
However, in both cases, although the install seemed to go fine, clicking on VMware Server Console in Applications>Other gave nothing. Trying from a terminal (vmware-server-console)gave a "command not found" error.
Then I remembered that in the case of both installs, I had asked for bridging to be set up for both ath0 and eth0 in the Virtual Machines. I wanted to not have to plug in the ethernet cable when I started up a VM on the Mac. However, maybe this was the problem.
So, I had to uninstall all of what was installed and start again.
To uninstall use this:

sudo vmware-uninstall.pl

(See here for more details)
Then reinstall VMware server as normal (see guide)
This time just bridge eth0 rather than trying for both eth0 and ath0 (wonder what would happen if I just selected ath0 -- is the VM set up to handle wireless?)
Now, the VMware Server can be started as normal.
Some things I noticed:
1. The Kurumin 8.04 screen in Foresight is the size you'd expect for the default 800x600 resolution. In Sidux, however, it fills the screen (after hitting fullScreen) but still "looks" like 800x600.
2. On the desktop, I was able to add the appropriate cheatcode to get the 1280x1024 screen to show for Kurumin 7 VM (in Ubuntu). But, certainly in Foresight, there doesn't seem to be any opportunity available to add this cheatcode. So does this mean we're stuck at 800x600?
3. In neither case have I added vmware-tools to kurumin 8.04 so that might make a big difference.
4. Mouse movement in Kurumin in Foresight was pretty good although still not quite perfect -- again this may well be because vmware-tools hasn't yet been installed.

Some more VM experience on the EeePC 901

For some incomprehensible reason, I deleted all of my VMs from my vm folder yesterday. What happened was that I had some additional, and pretty useless, Senryu vmdks in this folder and I wanted to do a

rm -rf Senryu*

However, I ended up doing a

rm -rf *

due to a complete mistake which deleted everything from that folder without the intervention of a trash bucket.
So, I had to get these VMs back which actually gave me the opportunity to re-assess how each worked.
First I created Zenwalk from the same source as before. Had the same problem with FullScreen mode, although, in reality, this is the only VM that I can get to work at true FullScreen mode in VMware Server on the EeePC so I shouldn't complain even though it is a bit of a rigmarole to get to it.
Internet is easy to set up (wireless) and just requires ZenPanel>Network Settings to change the DNS servers to OpenDNS and then start up eth1 which is the interface device name it uses.
The only real problem I had was that the mouse froze for 5-10 seconds very frequently and this made use of this VM annoyingly tedious. I changed the config settings of the mouse a number of times in VMware Server but all gave the same problem.
I also emailed the guy who produces all these VMs to see if he was aware of this problem.

I also re-created the Syllable VM just as before and played around with it for a while. As before, I found browsing in Syllable to be excruciatingly slow and I really would find little reason for ever looking at Syllable again. In addition, I can only get 800x600 resolution in VMware Server although wifi works out of the box.
I made the mistake of trying to download Opera in Syllable and this didn't get very far.

On the matter of getting a native install of Senryu on a physical partition (and including it in the EeePCs Grub menu), I sent a detailed letter to the guy Karl in the Senryu/Haiku forum and got a very interesting and potentially useful reply from him (see posts to this forum for 10-11-2008, that's November if you're from the USA).
This, while not providing a clear unequivocal step-by-step newbie guide to doing what he seems to have achieved, does very much suggest that this is not a joke and I'm very anxious to investigaate this with enthusiasm. At the very least, I'm going to learn a lot.

Installed Karmic Koala on my MacBook

I had previously tried Karmic Beta on the EeePC 901 and it worked pretty well. However, as I multiboot a number of Linux OSes as well as Haiku, the new Grub2 system scared me. This principally applied to the absence of /boot/grub/menu.lst which I have used for years without problems and the new /boot/grub/grub.cfg with its "Do Not Edit" warning. For multibooters, this is not convenient to put it mildly.
I additionally had some (as yet unexplained) wireless problems on the EeePC 901 with Karmic.
So, I tried again but this time on my MacBook (MacTel 2.1) and I did a clean install on the / partition while leaving /home untouched. I selected ext3 as the fs for both partitions mainly because that's what I already had on /home and I wasn't going to format this I wanted to have the same fs on both partitions.
The install went fine (incidentally, it took about 20 minutes in all which compares with about 70 minutes to install Pardus 2009 ad 100 minutes for Pardus 2008.2).
This time with the Ubuntu install I installed the Grub2 bootloader to the / partition instead of to the mbr as I want to avoid messing up mu multiboot system.
Then I had to use the install CD as a Live CD and go into Grub (1) as root. Then I setup Grub from Linux Mint (which still uses Grub1) on the mbr.
Then I was comfortably able to boot to Ubuntu Karmic. However, it is apparently possible to take out Grub 2 and substitute Grub 1 so I might do that soon.
I had relatively few problems in using Karmic. The problems I had, how I solved them as well as some enhancements I installed are listed below:
1. No sound in anything (vlc 1.0.0, lastfm, grooveshark). Initially I opened alsamixer and made sure nothing was muted which it wasn't. Then I installed gnome-alsamixer and did the same thing. Again nothing was muted.
I finally got the sound back by going to
Sound Preferences>>Hardware Tab
and selecting Analog Stereo Output as the setting for the selected device (of which there was only one).

2. Boot speed improved from about 75 seconds to 50 seconds by installing Ubuntu Boot as detailed here.

3. As I had already noticed when I install Karmic Beta on the EeePC 901, osd-notifications are displaced quite a bit lower on the screen than they used to be in Jaunty which is a little ugly. Fortunately, this is easy to fix just by installing this deb package.

4. I like to be able to use ctrl-alt-bckspc to restart X but this is disabled in Karmic (as it was in Jaunty, too). However, this is simple to enable just by going to
System>>Preferences>>Keyboard>>Layouts (tab)>>Layout Options (button) and checking the ctrl-alt-bckspc bot under Key Sequence to kill the X server.

5. I also disabled IPv6 as I don't have it available here and I used to have great problems in Firefox without disabling this. These days I don't use Firefox at all but nevertheless I disabled IPv6 by running

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6

Check if ipv6 is disabled by running

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6

where an output of 0=enabled and 1=disabled.

6. I followed the guide here to get iSight working in Karmic. This worked without a problem.